If you were, you know, living your lives, you've probably missed it, but old fires are burning brightly once again: there's somewhat of a falling-out going on between KDE and GNOME, with Canonical siding squarely with... KDE. The issue seems to revolve around GNOME's lack of collaboration, as explained by KDE's Aaron Seigo.

Not quite right. libappindicator is a library that is one implementation (Canonical/Unity) of the proposed spec. Apps that use the library would no more be required to assign copyright that any other library.

More importantly GNOME didn't need to accept libappindicator to implement the spec. They could have rejected libappindicator on copyright assignment or whatever grounds - as they have - and still implemented the spec on their own in GNOME shell. They didn't. They implemented their own app/systray mechanism in GNOME Shell while effectively ignoring the fact that on fd.o it was known that folks were trying to implement a cross-desktop systray/notification spec. Now apps built to use the GNOME Shell systray/notification area may not work with KDE's Plasma systray/notification area. And guess which party will probably adjust in the name of practicality? KDE. This is not the only instance of this kind of behavior and I can understand why KDE folks tire of it. I'm sure the KDE community and Canonical has areas for improvement as well. But, to Aaron's ultimate point, we can't keep pretending everything's peaches and sunshine when there is real damage occurring. As a FOSS community, we can do better than this...